Can a Menopausal Woman With Thyroid Issues, Nodules, and Shot Adrenals Do HIIT Workouts?

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Can a menopausal woman with thyroid issues and nodules as well as shot adrenals do hit foreign? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert and Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Karen Smith Towell from the Facebook asks, can a menopausal woman with thyroid issues and nodules as well as shot adrenals do hiit, meaning high intensity interval training? She says I need to get back into exercising again to lose stubborn weight, especially since I'm now in menopausal mode. But I'm afraid I'll make my thyroid and stressed adrenals even more stressed and I don't want my workouts to be counterproductive. Thanks so much. All right, there's a lot in this question to unpack. I'm ready to do it. I'll be right back. Stay with me.

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Okay, so, Karen, thank you so much for this and for this information. Saying, I want to get back into exercising again to lose stubborn weight, especially since I'm in menopausal mode, but I've got thyroid and adrenal issues. Here's the thing. Let's look at what is gonna be the most important for you to lose weight during menopause. And this is where I'm gonna go over and over and over again saying, your body's not a bank account, it's a chemistry lab and hormonal balances everything. So we wanna really work on making sure that the exercise you're doing helps with balancing hormones. I'm gonna do a shout out to my buddy Deborah ATKINSON, A flipping 50, because this is what she does. She teaches hormonally balanced exercise. So check out her programs because they will work really well for you. Because here's the thing, if you've got thyroid issues and stressed adrenals and you go push it hard, you will make it worse. And that's not going to help you with weight loss. What's important first in weight loss is to make sure your diet is super dialed in. So you figured out your food intolerances with the Virgin diet and you've lowered your Sugar Impact with the Sugar Impact diet. That is going to be first up, Right. And that you're really watching your meal timing as well, which is another thing I talk about in the Sugar Impact diet. Then we want to make sure that you are improving your adrenal function, which is the most important thing that you can be doing as you're moving into menopause is making sure that your adrenals are working well because they've got to really take the ball when you're going through menopause. So that means getting great sleep, doing great recovery. Now exercise is important for improving your adrenal status. What I want you to think about first is this just starting to move more throughout the day. This is where it's great to have a Fitbit or some kind of tracker that can actually watch the number of steps. So make sure that you're actually doing nice low intensity movement all day long. Get a dog, do whatever you need to do to move more. Okay? That's the first step. Next thing is starting to add in small amounts of high intensity interval training. So high intensity interval training is where you go all out for somewhere between 10 and 60 seconds and then you recover for twice as long. What I would tell you to do here is I would do more in the 20 second range, like a short burst. So 20 seconds hard and then 40 seconds easy. And I would do that to start, just accumulating two total minutes of hard. Okay, so that's so 10 of those short bursts. Do that to start. Do it every other day. Give yourself optimal time to recover and check on how you're feeling. If you're sore, if you're not recovering well, back it off. But you start with that. You start with just, you know, two minutes total of total bursting. And then over a week, once you've done it a week, if you're feeling okay, take it up to four total minutes of bursting and do that for a couple of weeks and see, you may have to back it down to five bursting. 20 seconds to start and then move it up to 10. You're going to have to see how you feel. So that's the first thing I would do. And the reason I'm stressing to add in the high intensity interval training first is because it teaches your sympathetic nervous system how to handle stress better. So it actually can help you here if you don't overdo it. Exercise is a bell shaped curve. It can be therapeutic or destructive depending on the dose. We want to make sure that you're doing enough but not too much and you're giving yourself adequate time to recover. The next thing I would add in here is I would look at what you can do that is good for restoring. So a good restorative yoga class and you can get these online. And that's what's great about all this, all this stuff you can do at home. You can use an exciser and I have those on my website@jjvirgin.com I have the link on how to get excisers. You can get an exciser to do your burst training, you can get on something like again, Deborah Atkinson's got great classes. You can get on one of the websites or core power Yoga and do a restorative yoga class for 20 minutes. You don't need to do much but adding that in on the opposite days and then once you start to feel stronger there then you can start to add in some resistance training. But give yourself time on each of this and remember that for you to lose weight during menopause, the most important thing is to create as much hormonal balance as possible. Which I know is like crazy moving target during menopause, but the big way to do that is to really take care of your adrenals. Good rest, good recovery. Teaching your body how to handle stress better. Alrighty. Hope that serves you.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert.

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